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by moron4hire 1924 days ago
I told you what usefulness I get out of it. Any one of those cores can decode a texture in T time. Do you want me to take T*N time to decode them on the render thread, or would you rather I took T*N/C off render thread on a system with C logical cores? I don't care that T is different on different machines. I don't care that C is different. Even small values of C makes up for some very large values of T on old CPUs.
1 comments
seniorgarcia 1924 days ago
And that is totally fine. If you don't care you don't need to know.

That has been my issue all along. Client computation of course needs to know how many threads are available to distribute computation in an efficient way. Why would the host need to know this though?

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moron4hire 1924 days ago
Who said anything about the host?
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seniorgarcia 1924 days ago
>Why does a webpage get to know how many CPU cores I have?

The question we have been replying too? Nobody gives a shit what you can do within the client. Fingerprinting the client as the host is an issue though, you might at least appreciate that...

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moron4hire 1924 days ago
What is your proposal? Forget the browser for a minute. Just any way, short of airgapping, that a user could receive an app, want that app to perform maximally, but also not have information about the system being egressed?

I don't appreciate it because it's childish. You want to make this out to be a privacy issue when it's not. It adds nothing meaningful to how easily you can be fingerprinted, but removing it would detract significantly from how performant a browser-based application can be made. Without it, you're pushing developers towards having to build native apps instead, giving even MORE access to the hardware fingerprint, where they are now stuck having to pay fealty to the platform gods, while also gaining nothing in reducing fingerprinting in the browser.

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seniorgarcia 1924 days ago
I do not dispute that you can use this in your app, my issue is with the server knowing about it (as it is in the demo here) and everything the server can call back from the client. It is not about airgapping but about realizing that current browsers can exfiltrate basically anything.

Your JS app wants to compute the amount of threads it can use on a client, that's great. If your JS app can calculate me switching browsers and using independent websites and their usage, that's cool. Why would you send that back to your server though?

If you do not think that current browser implementations have an issue with the amount of fingerprinting they can do, that is up to you as well. I think that the amount fingerprinting is at the very least difficult though. It is not about building native apps, it is about the amount of information that is send back. Or I'm drunk at this point and should go to sleep, I think I'm done in any case. Sorry about being an ass.

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